Do Talkative Women Leaders Have Less Power Than Talkative Men?

Victoria Brescoll, a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, probes the impact of stereotypes on people’s status inside organizations. She’s especially interested in the way women and men get treated at work, when they exhibit the same behavior. Back in 2007, Brescoll made headlines for her study, “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead? Gender, Status Conferral, and Workplace Emotion Expression,” published in the journal Psychological Science. She found that while men score points when they express anger in a professional context, angry women invite the opposite response. They’re seen as out of control and they lose stature. That was five years ago, but my guess would be that Brescoll would find the same result were she to run the study again today.

This week, The Wall Street Journal reported on another Brescoll study, this time comparing talkative male leaders to talkative women bosses. Brescoll had 156 subjects read articles about a fictional CEO. The articles had four different versions. One described a talkative male CEO, another a talkative female CEO. The other two versions featured a quiet male chief and a quiet female boss. The articles described the talkative bosses as responding frequently and voicing their opinions to other executives. The quiet bosses kept their opinions to themselves.

Brescoll asked the study subjects to rate the CEOs’ competency on a scale of one to seven. On average, the talkative male CEOs got a rating of 5.64 while the women scored 5.11. When it came to the quiet bosses, the men scored just 4.83 while the women scored 5.62, almost as high as the talkative male CEOs. Both male and female study participants penalized the talkative women bosses.

In another experiment, written up in the same paper, Drescoll looked at C-Span tapes and Congressional Record data to gauge the effectiveness of men and women senators. She studied the correlation between senators’ talkativeness on the floor and their power, measured by their ability to do things like pass laws, sit on committees, and get earmarks. She looked at footage from both 2005, when Republicans controlled the chamber and 2007, when Democrats did. Her finding: more talking time conferred more power on male senators. For women, it made no difference how much they spoke on the senate floor.

For leaders, listening skills are among the most important. But Drescoll’s work reveals that people don’t expect to observe the same listening skills from men as they do from women. “When women have power, they just don’t have the same license as men to talk as much,” Brescoll told the Journal.